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0:00:11.6 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, this is Inside Geocaching HQ, a special edition episode. I am Chris Ronan, aka Rock Chalk, one of the HQ lackeys. Today, Geocaching HQ launched a third locationless cache called GC9FAVE, that is GC9F-A-V, as in Victor-E. Discovered while geocaching locationless cache, it will be available to log beginning August 17th and continuing through the end of 2023. I checked in with Cindy Potter, HQ’s director of community, to talk about the details of this new cache. Here is our conversation.

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0:01:02.6 CR: Alright. Well, there is another locationless cache out there, it is called GC9FAVE, discovered while geocaching locationless cache. It will be available to log beginning August 17th. Cindy, let’s talk about locationless caches, this the third active one. Why did we decide to do a third locationless cache? I know the answer to it, but…

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0:01:28.9 Cindy Potter: That’s true, yes.

0:01:29.5 CR: But I can’t talk to myself.

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0:01:32.9 CP: We were all in a room and thinking about the HQ celebration but also about Year of the Hide, seeing that GC8FROG and GC8NEAT, the previous two locationless caches that we’ve created had been quite successful. We looked at a lot of logs that people created and saw that there was… There continued to be positive energy around them. But we have end dates for both of those. And we thought, “Well, it would be nice to have one continue after those two are archived so that we can continue to celebrate what makes geocaching unique.”

0:02:14.7 CR: And before we get into some of the details of this locationless cache, you mentioned how successful the other ones have been. GC8FROG was published in December of 2019, there have been over 18,000 found-its on that one, and over 21,000 images posted on that cache page, which is really remarkable. And GC8NEAT was published in January of 2021, 31,800 found-its and over 48,000 images. And it’s also really cool to look through the logs on each of those pages. You see so many different languages, so many different people from all different countries experiencing these two caches. And I think all of that kinda goes into, for us, what has made those two so successful. Those are some of the metrics that we look at when determining that.

0:03:08.4 CP: Absolutely. I remember we were looking at GC8NEAT at the end of… Or towards the end of last year. And we were planning to archive it at the end of the year, but we saw that it was still getting more than a dozen logs a day, I think it was more like two dozen logs a day. And you’d look at the logs, and they were full of photos of clean-ups that they were doing, enthusiasm about the idea, pride in the fact that the community was rolling up their sleeves and contributing to making everything look nicer. And so it seemed at the time that we should let that one continue. And both GC8NEAT and GC8FROG, I think, represent part of the game that’s unique. Of course, the FROG being our mascot, that was a fun first locationless we did. But it is more challenging, especially it was very challenging during COVID for people to log.

0:04:09.2 CP: So then we came up with GC8NEAT, knowing that… Well, then people can log this one more easily, because they can do a clean-up or environmental improvement almost anywhere. And likewise, for this upcoming one, the GC9FAVE, we wanted to continue the success of the second one, where it can be done from anywhere. And in lots of brainstorming this one, we brainstormed on our team, as you remember, and then we also solicited ideas from community volunteers, and then we had the lackeys vote on different ideas. And you coordinated that survey and told me that by far this idea was the highest one. The… What did… Find a place that you discovered only because of geocaching, because it represents everything that’s great about this game. So I believe the logs on this cache will be really fun to look at, so I’m looking forward to seeing that.

0:05:15.5 CR: Yeah, I’m really excited too about seeing these favorite places that people have found through geocaching, it’s… You hear it so much that it’s a cliche really to say that, “I never would have found this place if it wasn’t for geocaching.” And this is an opportunity for people to show us those places. That maybe it is a place that you never would have found, or maybe it’s a very popular place, whatever, but that favorite spot that you came upon because of geocaching. And as you said, it’s just such a central part of the game that it’s really neat to be able to celebrate that aspect of it through this locationless cache.

0:06:00.1 CP: Yeah. I think one thing to… For people to think about as they choose their spot is that we didn’t intend for it to be their most favorite location ever, because of course, that might be the Galapagos Island or it might be the top of a volcano, but you might not have the capacity to take that trip again, and so that’s why we put the word “local” in there, kind of a local gem that you wanna share with the world, what’s your favorite local place that you discovered wild geocaching. So it allows you to step closer to home and to say, “Okay, if I had out-of-town visitors that were geocachers, what are some of those hidden waterfalls or… ” Like in Seattle, maybe it’s the Gum Wall. I grew up in Seattle, I didn’t even know about the Gum Wall until geocaching or some other, maybe more natural area than a Gum Wall that you might wanna share, but it doesn’t have to… Nobody should feel the pressure that their log and their photo has to represent the pinnacle of geocaching, it just needs to represent something that they had that aha moment like, I would have never found this in my own…

0:07:15.8 CP: Maybe my own county or my own state, I would have never found this if it weren’t for this game, and we’re giving you an opportunity to need to go back again. Maybe you take somebody new with you this time to introduce them to this spot, so it just offers another opportunity, and since it overlaps with Year of the Hide, it also helps us to highlight in one cache page all the cool spots that geocache hiders have set out on our platform, that they’ve introduced people to various places, and so we put it as a tip, Consider adding the GC-code if you’re not going to give any spoilers away, because then it’s also kind of like this running list of cool spots that people could consider going to if they see the photo.

0:08:15.6 CR: Yeah, totally. And people have time to do this, it’s available to log through December 31st of 2023, so you have more than a year, there’s no need to rush out and get this logged in a week or something, you can take your time and pick… Pick that local spot. And as you said, I think a great idea is maybe take somebody with you or somebody that hasn’t seen it themselves, and there’s all kinds of possibilities, and I think that we also never think of all the possibilities that the community will come up with, so I think it’ll be fun to see what people do with this, and as you said, it’d be fun to watch the cache page, the logs and the photos and all that stuff rolling over the next several months. And so this will be the third active locationless cache at least for a few months until GC8FROG and GC8NEAT are archived at the end of this year. I think a question that people might have is, does this mean that we’re… That HQ is going to be publishing locationless caches on a regular basis? Is there some sort of a list of them that we have some place that we’ve got to schedule? And the short answer is no, but we can maybe talk more about the long answer.

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0:09:29.2 CP: Yeah. Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question, right? What are all the secret plans that HQ has. Well, sometimes we don’t have any specific plans and we’ll be transparent with the community that we do not have current plans to add any more locationless caches. This was originally created as a nod to the past, and it was celebrating 20 years of geocaching, and we felt like it was nice to give that nod to the past, so we’ll see how this one goes and whether we continue to need that and whether we come up with other themes that would make sense, but for right now, we don’t have specific plans for locationless. One of the things I liked about doing this was that although maybe some people from the early, early, early days that logged locationless might feel like it wasn’t fair to make this old icon available to others, I think that it’s important for new players to the game to feel that they have an opportunity to get some of those old icons, and so that that was our nod to the past here, is to just make a few HQ-owned ones available, but we’re not intending to bring them back in full force or do anything like we had before where we launch them so that people can create them again.

0:10:58.3 CR: Well, so that’s the answer to the million-dollar question. I guess the two million-dollar question would be, have you decided what your favorite local place is?

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0:11:06.6 CP: I think I’ve decided it’s not the Gum Wall because I do like the outdoors. And yes, it is the local place that I discovered through geocaching, but I’ve also discovered several other places, one of which I just revisited a couple of weekends ago with my son, so it’s kind of more of a geological EarthCache spot that I might do again. But I still wanna think about it, and I’m sure there will be other ideas that I come up with.

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0:11:38.6 CR: That was Cindy Potter, Director of Community at Geocaching HQ. If you would like to know more about GC9FAVE discovered while geocaching locationless cache, visit the geocaching blog or just type GC9-F-A-V-E into the search on geocaching.com or the Geocaching app, and start thinking about a favorite place that you would like to revisit to log this special cache. For Cindy and myself and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.